Corruption rises to the top in India. Forty percent of sitting MPs in the Lok Sabha, India’s Parliament, have criminal records, according to a study reported in The Wire in May 2023. Of them, 25 percent faced charges of serious crimes including murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, rape, and other crimes against women. And it’s the same at the very top. In 2021, the Indian Express reported that 42 percent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Council of Ministers have declared criminal cases against them. (Ninety percent are millionaires.) In Age of Vice, India-born novelist Deepti Kapoor probes the depth of crime and corruption in India through the story of one supremely powerful criminal family.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Three young people dominate the story
Bunty Wadia is the boss. He holds a monopoly on the production and sale of liquor in the enormous state of Uttar Pradesh as well as numerous other businesses. His power rests on his support for the state’s chief minister. Bunty masquerades as an honest businessman based in Delhi, while his brother, Vikram, known as Vicky, controls much of the western reaches of the state through a notoriously violent criminal gang.
But Bunty’s son, Sunny, sees himself pursuing a different path. He’s a patron of the arts and friend to all the beautiful young people of the capital. And it’s he, and two of the other young people in his orbit, who hold our attention throughout Kapoor’s story. Both idolize him. Ajay, a poor boy from a village in the west, flees his home and works his way up to a job as Sunny’s personal aide and driver. And Neda Kapur, a journalist, charms her way into his inner circle—and into his bed.
Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor (2023) 560 pages ★★★★★
“This is Kali Yuga, the losing age, the age of vice”
The action in Age of Vice pivots on the events of a single tragic night in Delhi. “Five pavement-dwellers lie dead at the side of Delhi’s Inner Ring Road. Their bodies have been dragged ten meters by the speeding Mercedes that jumped the curb and cut them down.” Sunny, Neda, and Ajay are all at the scene—and their lives will spin out of control in its aftermath.
Kapoor shifts perspective back and forth through the years from 1991 to 2008. Along the way,, she introduces the backstory for each of the three central characters. Only gradually do we learn how they came to know one another. And we watch their lives unravel in slow motion. Each of the three is a compelling character. We believe what’s happening to them and how they fail to cope with it.
At one point along the way, an investigative reporter manages to gather a mountain of incriminating evidence about Bunty Wadia’s criminal activities. But an editor advises him, “If you use any of this, just remember, nothing will change, this is Kali Yuga, the losing age, the age of vice.” If there is such a thing as Indian noir, this novel is a prime example.
The novel’s setting
Age of Vice is set in the city of Delhi—the world’s second largest city after Tokyo—and the state that surrounds it, Uttar Pradesh, or UP. The state hugs India’s northern border, abutting Nepal to the north. It’s India’s most populous state, housing more than 250 million people. If UP were a country, it would rank fifth in the world by population, exceeded only by India, China, the United States, and Indonesia.
Western tourists flock to UP’s historic sites, Agra Fort and the Taj Mahal. But the state is overwhelmingly rural, despite having seven cities with populations exceeding one million people each. Its more than 100,000 villages define the reality of life in Uttar Pradesh. There, India’s age-old caste system, local landlords and money-lenders, and the harsh realities of an uncertain climate rule the lives of its people. And that’s the ground to which Age of Vice is anchored. Despite all the scenes in Delhi and other cities, our focus never lands far from the villages of Uttar Pradesh.
Understanding all this, we can see how very powerful UP’s chief minister might be. Powerful, and with the wealth of one-sixth of India’s people essentially his for the taking. And thus how immense might be the power and wealth of the man who makes it all possible, Bunty Wadia.
About the author
Deepti Kapoor was born in 1980 in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, in 1980. According to Goodreads, she “and grew up in Bombay, Bahrain and Dehradun. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. She spent the next decade working for various publications, driving around [Delhi], finding stories and learning its streets.” She lived there and in Goa before moving to Lisbon, Portugal, with her husband. Age of Vice is her second novel. There are rumors it’s the first book in a trilogy.
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